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Landmarks for Common Folk

IN Italo Calvino's 1972 novel, ''Invisible Cities,'' a fictional Marco Polo recounts his journeys through imagined lands and their dreamlike capitals. In these mysterious places, people mingle in a caldron of exuberance and suffering, against a backdrop of clashing architecture and sensuous detail.

Then Polo comes to a region called Trude, where every town has ''the same little greenish and yellowish houses'' and ''the same flower beds in the same square.'' He wanders stupefied across this zone, where ''only the name of the airport changes.'' Never mind living here, Polo thinks. Why even visit?

Fear of Trude, you might say, has long motivated New York's preservationists. It is historical sites and great architectural monuments, they say, that distinguish the city from Calvino's thinly veiled failure of a suburb or its urban equivalent: uniform blocks of straight-edged towers like the building that replaced Pennsylvania Station, that neoclassical martyr to their cause. In other words, it is distinctive places that do much to make New York livable and attract visitors.

But even as the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission has been energetically designating notable buildings and historic districts -- 1,050 individual landmarks and 76 districts since designations began in 1965 -- a growing number of preservationists are trying to expand the definition of what qualifies for this status. The aim is to move beyond high-style architectural structures like Grand Central Terminal or the Chrysler Building to ordinary-looking places where important figures other than generals or presidents lived, along with places where the common folk worked and played.

This new approach, called cultural landmarking, emerged about a decade ago, primarily in New York, as the broader idea of multiculturalism seeped into the field of historic preservation. Its supporters contend that traditional landmarking overlooks many mundane but meaningful places, especially outside Manhattan, that make up an invisible city of their own. These are the modest dwellings that housed some of the grass-roots shapers of American and world culture, as well as the beer halls and sweet shops and roller rinks that hold scant architectural significance but draw disparate people together into vibrant public spaces.

Alexander Hamilton did not live in them and the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White did not design them. But generations of ordinary New Yorkers used them, and in doing so made them touchstones of communal memory.

The exuberantly Art Deco Radio City Music Hall is an official city landmark. But the chance was lost to make a landmark of the Hunts Point Palace, a hulking dance hall on Southern Boulevard in Hunts Point, the Bronx, where Thelonious Monk and Art Blakey alternated sets with mambo bands in the 1940's. Today, the building is being renovated as an office complex.

The Gothic splendor of St. Patrick's Cathedral made it eligible for designation, but the brick and terra cotta Cuyler Presbyterian Church on Pacific Street in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, spiritual home to the hundreds of Mohawk Indians who built Manhattan's skyscrapers, is not. Built around 1890, it is now a private home.

The New York Stock Exchange is a landmark. But the Asch Building at Greene Street and Washington Place in Greenwich Village, the scene of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, has never been cited.

Now, however, small but significant steps are being taken to put cultural landmarking on the map. Place Matters, a joint project of the Municipal Art Society and a New York cultural organization called City Lore, is compiling what it says is the country's first census of potential cultural landmarks. The organization already has 300 suggestions.

''There is general agreement about who the important architects are and what are the elements of high architectural style,'' said Laura Hansen, a director of Place Matters. ''But often the traditions that are associated with a place are as much a part of its significance as the physical fabric.''

Skating to a Big Beat

In many respects, the Empire Roller Disco on Empire Boulevard near Bedford Avenue in Crown Heights, a low-slung pink and aqua building, is a typical candidate for cultural landmarking.

The other day, Khadijah Shaheed, a 40-ish mother of four, sat at a plastic table in the Empire and explained why she nominated this squat pile of bricks to the Place Matters census. As she reminisced, music boomed, neon palm trees flickered, and burgers from the refreshment stand sizzled and spit.

The Empire opened in 1935, and in its first two decades it offered boxing matches and miniature golf to Eastern European immigrants who lived nearby. But in the early 70's, the rink reinvented itself to satisfy a population that was becoming increasingly black and Latino.

That was when Ms. Shaheed used to take a bus to the rink from her home in the Marcy Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Around the time she was learning to primp for boys and smoke cigarettes in the bathroom, the Empire was becoming the first roller rink in the country to stifle the organ music and pump up the funk with disco and rhythm and blues.

''This is where I came into my own,'' Ms. Shaheed said, remembering her smooth moves to the Shi-Lites and Marvin Gaye in a place where she claims she never fell.

Pointing to a distant bend in the huge wooden oval, she recalled, ''That was where one of the older girls, my friend Moochie, taught me to skate by crossing one leg over the other.''

''She told me, 'No boys will want to skate with you if you're not graceful,' '' she added.

In the 80's, the 300,000-square-foot Empire was transformed yet again, into a dimly lighted clublike place where on most nights marijuana smoke laced the air. It was then that Ms. Shaheed's first marriage ended and she met R. K. Sharrief Al Bey, a friend from the Nation of Islam.

''I wanted to skate with him,'' she said, ''but I couldn't because it was strict and you couldn't go out one on one.''

They had their first date on an oldies night at the Empire in 1988.

''We were the last ones on the floor,'' she recalled with a slow, sly smile. ''When we finished, our legs were wobbly.'' They married within a year.

Mr. Sharrief Al Bey, 43, remembers two formerly thriving roller rinks that have followed disco into the Dumpster of pop culture history: the Rooftop at 155th Street, near the old Polo Grounds in Washington Heights, and the Bruckner on 149th Street in the South Bronx. But even when they were open, the Empire was the main attraction, a fact shown by the hundreds of skaters who went to a reunion there three weeks ago.

''Besides the Skate Key on 138th Street off the Deegan Expressway, this is the only place left in the city,'' Mr. Sharrief Al Bey said. ''But this place is the legend.''

The Empire reopened this year under new ownership after a 15-month renovation. It is brighter now, veterans say, and the rough element is gone. During Family Day a few Sundays ago, the rink swarmed with hundreds of young people, and two birthday parties were in full swing. On one wall was painted a maplike mural of a place called ''Empire of Brooklyn.'' A bold red cross marks the location of the rink.

Gatekeeper of the Landmarks

There are several ways to designate worthy buildings, such as including them on the National Register of Historic Places, but the label that matters is the city's. That is because the city's landmarks law has teeth. Although owners of historic properties qualify for grants and low-interest loans for restoration work, the law penalizes owners who alter a building in a way that compromises its historic integrity.

But if cultural landmarking is to become widespread, the Landmarks Preservation Commission must change the way it thinks about historic preservation. Statements by commission members show how how ticklish a subject it is.

In an interview two weeks ago, the commission's chairwoman, Jennifer J. Raab, said she agrees with the concept of designating cultural landmarks.

''There is not a large percentage of our individual landmarks that are done for purely cultural reasons,'' Ms. Raab said, ''but they are important.'' She said 12 of the city's 1,050 landmarks qualify as cultural landmarks.

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In a later conversation, however, Terri Rosen Deutsch, the commission's chief of staff, said she could not provide a list of cultural landmarks, saying sites are often designated for several reasons. ''You should be very careful about what you call a cultural landmark,'' she said.

Whatever the agency may call them, sites of cultural significance have been placed on its rolls. They include the Charlie Parker Residence, on Tompkins Square in the East Village, and the Louis Armstrong House in Corona, Queens.

There is no lack of other candidates. Examples are the Palm Restaurant on Second Avenue in Manhattan, renowned for its steaks and its caricatures; the Mott Street General Store in Chinatown, where traditional Chinese herbs and ceremonial clothing can still be found; Bohemian Hall in Astoria, Queens, where hundreds can sit in a walled garden drinking Czech beer; Casita Rincon Criollo in the Melrose section of the Bronx, where musicians play folk tunes in a garden next to a traditional Puerto Rican shack; and Our Lady of Mount Carmel Grotto in Rosebank, Staten Island, a Roman Catholic shrine that incorporates seashells and bicycle reflectors.

Another prime example is CBGB, the venerable East Village temple to punk rock. The building, at First Street and the Bowery, is architecturally boring. But the club, with its black and white awning and inflamed graffiti skin, is a cultural magnet for those who come to hear the latest noise bands thrash through their sets. Pass through CBGB's battle-scarred plexiglass doors and you know you're not in Trude.

Ms. Hansen of Place Matters granted that designating CBGB as a cultural landmark might undercut its outlaw dynamism. It might be better to mark it with an art installation, she suggested. But she thinks CBGB, which made the Place Matters census, supports her point nicely.

''We need a more democratic view of landmarks,'' she said, ''one that retains the city's rich diversity of place.''

Place Matters has repeatedly recommended that the commission make an inventory of potential cultural landmarks. In response, Ms. Raab said the commission had enough to do.

''We designate 25 buildings a year and two historic districts,'' she said. ''I think we're very, very active.''

She also pointed out that the commission's regulatory burden grows with each new place it designates. Last year its staff and 11 unpaid commissioners considered 7,933 requests from owners of landmark properties who wanted to alter them. Most requests were granted, often after long discussions. Counting the buildings in historic districts, the agency oversees more than 20,000 structures.

''It's a juggling game to use the commissioners' time to review things to meet your goals as well as to keep up with the regulatory function of the agency,'' said Gene A. Norman, chairman from 1983 to 1989.

Besides, Ms. Raab said, the public already inundates the agency with recommendations. ''One of the blessings of living in New York City,'' she said, ''is that there is so much interest in history, architecture and culture that we hear many suggestions for landmarks.''

One suggestion focused on the Lewis H. Latimer House in Flushing, Queens. Latimer was a black inventor and engineer who worked with Alexander Graham Bell on the patent application for the telephone and with Thomas Edison on refinements to the light bulb. From 1902 to 1928 he lived in a frame house that looks like any other middle-class home that has sprouted some stubby additions over the years. In 1988 a developer was poised to tear it down, but a group formed by a minister got the building moved several blocks away and protected as a landmark.

Ms. Raab said the designation was a small but useful corrective to the record. ''Edison was celebrated and Latimer was ignored,'' she said, ''most likely because he was African-American.''

This reasoning strikes John Tauranac, an urban historian and the author of ''Manhattan Block by Block: A Street Atlas,'' as a kind of affirmative action for buildings. ''This could lead to a lot of places being designated that might be important to one cross-section of society,'' Mr. Tauranac said, ''but not to society in general.''

The Enforcement Problem

Assume that places like CBGB and the Empire Roller Disco are one day designated as cultural landmarks. How can such a designation be regulated and enforced?

There are no easy answers. Preservationists and historians generally agree as to what a Second Empire roof line should look like (a half-mashed top hat), but consensus on cultural sites is harder to reach. ''How do you regulate something that is not distinctive architecture?'' asked Kent Barwick, president of the Municipal Art Society and a former chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

The Louis Armstrong House embodies no precise architectural style, Mr. Barwick points out. But, he suggests, the city can compensate by maintaining the house as it looked when Armstrong lived there between 1943 and 1971. ''Keep the television antenna and the '52 Buick,'' Mr. Barwick said.

Then comes the question whether designation of a cultural landmark might stunt its natural growth and evolution.

If the Empire had been made a landmark before the early 1970's, would it have mutated into a roller disco serving a mostly black and Latino clientele? If the Empire is designated now, will that pickle it in its current incarnation, thwarting new uses?

Owners react to the idea in different ways. Bob Clayton, an owner of the Empire, said he would not object to landmark status. But a more typical response came from John Bartunek, the manager of Bohemian Hall, who said, ''Would we have to ask, or beg, to change the building because it is historical?''

Some people have urged a system under which the city would periodically review the status of a cultural landmark. At present, lifting a designation is difficult. But if the Empire failed as a roller rink and was turned into a car wash, why not let the city strike it from the rolls of the protected?

Mr. Barwick offered Times Square as another regulatory model. In the 1980's, he recalled, after much ''tussling and kicking in the shins,'' the Municipal Art Society persuaded the city to preserve Times Square's aura of ''hypersalesmanship'' by requiring that its buildings display illuminated signs. Structures may still come and go, but the area's cultural face is preserved.

''Does that cause it to resemble the Times Square of 1950?'' Mr. Barwick asked. ''No. But it is a recognizable heir.''

Despite the obstacles posed by cultural landmarking, Mr. Barwick and others seem to think its time has come. ''I would expect that 10 years hence, there would be a greater number of cultural landmarks,'' he said.

That might lead to a city like the final place Marco Polo describes in Calvino's novel. This place, the opposite of Trude, is a constantly changing metropolis that retains the marks of its past, ''a temporal succession of different cities,'' Calvino writes, ''wrapped one within the other, confined, crammed and inextricable.''

Correction: November 19, 2000, Sunday The main front-page article in this section on Nov. 5, about efforts to provide landmark protection for notable buildings of modest architecture, mispelled the name of a singing group whose music was played in the 1970's at the Empire Roller Disco in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. It was the Chi-Lites, not the Shi-Lites. A chart with the article misstated the location of a housing project, First Houses, that was declared a landmark in 1974. It is at East Third Street and Avenue A, not First Avenue and 64th Street.